Monday, June 18, 2018

The Sounds of Children



This is audio from inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility, made available by ProPublica. If children crying for their parents bothers you, this will bother you, but you need to hear it. There are subtitles.

The Trump administration instituted a new policy a couple of months ago that every person crossing the border illegally will be arrested. Crossing the border illegally is a misdemeanor. Since children cannot be sent to jail, they are sent to separate holding facilities without their parents, which are defined as "not jail." Over 2,000 children have been separated from their parents in this manner since April, and so many more are coming in every day that a new tent city was erected overnight in Texas to hold the overflow.

It is legal to cross the border at an official port of entry to ask for asylum. Many of the people arrested are seeking asylum, but the border patrol is not allowing people to cross at an official port of entry for the purpose of asylum. So they enter elsewhere, ask for asylum, and are arrested. 

The current administration has stated that this tactic is being used as a deterrent, so that people will not come to the US for asylum. Put yourself in a refugee's place. If your home country is so dangerous that you'd walk to the US to escape it, any haven is better than no haven. If I were forced to choose between my child dying or being separated from me, I'd choose the separation. But it's still evil and unnecessary, and our federal government is only doing it to inflict pain upon these families. Trump says he will lift the child separation practice if Congress gives him an immigration bill that includes $25 billion for a border wall. Does that not sound like ransom to you?

There are plenty of people who think arresting refugees is a fine tactic, that we can't have so many immigrants here. Their ancestors who came to the US as refugees ...well, they say that's different. I am a white woman born in the US, but there is nothing at all that makes me any more deserving of safety and freedom than someone fleeing a lawless country to seek safety for their family. God loves the refugee children as much as He loves me.

Twenty years ago today, I took a child out of a Communist country and brought her to the US to grow up in an intact family. When I, an American, walked into the US Consulate at Guangzhou, our group passed through hundreds of Chinese citizens outside who had been waiting for weeks just to get an appointment to ask for a US visa. We walked right in, privileged because of an accident of birth. And now we have children being separated from their mothers and fathers right here in our country, sent to their own jails and camps, with no protocol in place to reunite them with their parents, who could be deported without them. That ain't right, no matter who you are.

What kind of nation have we turned into?


8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your disloyalty to Hair Furor has been noted. In time, you will learn to love Dear Leader.

Barbwire said...

I can't even watch this. It would upset me too much. I think the treatment of these children is vile.

Bruce said...

Why isn't the party of family values screaming at the top of their lungs to end this?

Miss Cellania said...

They are starting to, Bruce, now that they see which way the wind is blowing. Franklin Graham denounced it, then Laura Bush, but actual elected Republicans are still weighing the pros and cons of an opinion.

Anonymous said...

blah blah blah, where was the mock outrage when it was the Obama administration that established this policy. In fact the first news reports had to rescind their articles as they had used pictures during Obama's regime.

Miss Cellania said...

Anonymous, we've heard complaints from the right for two years now about Obama's "catch and release" policy. Is that what you're referring to?

Anonymous said...

http://www.businessinsider.com/migrant-children-in-cages-2014-photos-explained-2018-5

Bruce said...

Did you even read the article you posted? The children pictured were "unaccompanied". BIG difference.